Tag Archives: Rio Madre de Dios

There are two boats out to Corto Maltes. I take the early one, and ride out toward Corto Maltes with a group of Peruvians. Ragna and Selma must be taking the later boat. I’m the only foreigner on this one.

It feels good to be on the water. It feels good to be riding up the Madre de Dios River, a wide brown river with plenty of vegetation on each bank. There isn’t really much to see, but I keep watching with great interest.

After perhaps twenty minutes we reach a landing with a small dock and a couple of other boats tied up. I think we’re going to let someone off or deliver something, but this is it. We’ve arrived. I’d known the lodge was close, but not this close.

In fact, we’ve arrived so early that I get a bit of breakfast.

The dining room is a large, screened room flanked by a small shop and a large bar with a pool table. After breakfast I talk to one of the waiters. Ragna’s birthday is Friday. Even though we are no longer a couple, I want her to have a cake. We arrange that his wife will have one decorated with Ragna’s name and a little Icelandic flag, and he will bring it out after supper Friday evening.

I meet Luci, a knowledgeable young woman from the area who will be our guide during our stay. (She does not always look quite as she does in the photo at right.) She says we can go to Monkey Island with another group in twenty minutes or so. I agree.

As I walk toward my cabin I shoot a picture of a green parrot in the branch of a small tree, then put out my finger for the parrot to step onto it.

It’s not as if it’s the first time I’ve had a parrot perched on my hand; but I stare at his green and yellow feathers, and at the rich browns and other colors the sunlight finds in his eyes. He makes a small noise that sounds like “uh, oh,” and when I answer it we repeat the meaningless sounds over and over in turn, as I used to do with Ragna’s grandson Elia, who was then 4 or 5 years old, when I was first traveling to Iceland. I am growing quite attached to the bird, but as we move onto the main path, and I say “Buenos Dias” to a cleaning woman, she says something about the bird, then deftly removes him from my shoulder by placing the end of the broom handle near his claws. As he steps onto it, I ask her his name, and she tells me “Panchito.” She pinches her left forearm with the fingers of her right hand to warn me that he might claw or nip. I’m thinking he must do that only when frightened, but I’m not inclined to argue.

My cabin is a spare but delightful wooden structure. The front porch has two hammocks. I quickly fall into one.

Aimlessly I push my hand against the cabin so that the hammock swings back and forth, at first fairly violently and then, like a pendulum, smaller and smaller distances. The rope groans regularly, like the heartbeat of the Great Mother, lulling me to sleep in safety. Hearing it not through the air but through the material of the hammock against my ear is perhaps like hearing from the womb, and the two-beat is regular: one beat as the hammock approaches the apex of its swing to the left, then a beat of silence as it reaches that apex and begins to drop back toward the center, then the second heartbeat as it approaches its high-point on the right.

Within moments I’m asleep. But soon I drift back to consciousness, and we leave for Monkey Island.

Isla de Monos

Luci and I arrive with Carlos and the French, or French Swiss, to whom he explains everything in French. We cross a stretch of sand, then follow a path through the vegetation. It is the dry season. If it were not, Luci tells me, this path would be an inlet we would enter in a boat, or perhaps by wading. (It’s a fact of rainforest life I’ve read about: as here, a river’s height can vary ten feet or more with the seasons. In some places, a boat landing is on the edge of town in the wet months, but a mile or two away from town in the dry season.)

Luci and Carlos leave us behind near a huge tree and a feeding platform that can be lowered and raised with ropes, so that the platform, laden with inviting bananas, can be raised to a level where the monkeys feel safe but can be seen and photographed. They go on, hoping to attract the monkeys toward the feeding platform. She invites me to go with them, but I’m doubting the French or French-Swiss will appreciate that, so I pass. We stand around for a long time, occasionally hearing monkey calls almost certainly made by our guides. Eventually they return, and a monkey also appears, high in a distant tree, and begins swinging and jumping his way from there to the feeding platform, always high above the ground.

and do spot monkeys

we watch butterflies

and scan the sky

Isla de Monos is not terribly interesting. It is not an island the monkeys chose to populate, but rather a project to return monkeys, which had been pets in Puerto Maldonado, to their native environment. It started about eight years ago. The varieties of monkeys have dwindled a bit because the brown Capuchin monkeys killed most everyone else.

photographing each other

escaping the heat

Evening Nature Walk

Luci leads us on an evening nature walk that is a good deal more interesting than it sounds. Highlights include: walking trees, a tree used for dyes, and a tree used to salve women’s broken hearts. (There is another for men, but we don’t see it on this particular walk.) She tells us a lot that is very interesting but will disappear from my feeble brain before I get around to writing this. However, I do recall a tree used as a love potion (for lovelorn women – men use a different plant), another that provides a natural dye, and a third that actually walks, albeit slowly.

Night Ride

After supper we go upriver a ways in the boat, with flashlights and headlamps. There’s a searchlight mounted on the boat. Along with Luci and the boatman, we scan the shore for cayman. We do spot a few. It’s fun. Photographing them is a challenge.

We also see capybaras, comically awkward creatures who look at us in surprise. They look like refugees from Winnie-the-Pooh’s world.

Later, I drink a couple of pisco sours and shoot some pool in the bar with one of the guides. At 11, when the generator goes off for the night and there’s no electricity, I wend my way back to my cabin, feeling good.

Life at Corto Maltes

It is a peaceful and isolated place. The wood cabins are comfortable and romantic. The guides are knowledgeable. The bar is relaxing, lively enough to enjoy but not loud. There’s a swimming pool, welcome in the heat here.

Our group also includes a couple from South Africa and a retired schoolteacher from Toronto, accompanied by his two daughters. The Canadians, having just finished the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu, are particularly delighted by the pool. There are also other groups, keeping different schedules and often speaking different languages, and we usually see them only at meals.

The cabins are well-appointed and simple. Dominated by wood and nature, it’s a place one might easily wish to enjoy with a lover. Oddly, that thought comes to me not as a sour-grapes lament that Ragna and I didn’t make it so far, but as it might if I’d come alone, seen the obvious romantic nature of the place, and pictured no particular woman joining me.

We all like the hammocks very much. One morning I pass the Canadian school-teacher lying in his, with one daughter in the other, and the green parrot sleeping with him in his. Or, in the Rilke-Wright formulation, “guarding his solitude.”

Ragna and Selma lie often in their hammock, chatting and laughing. Dozing in mine, I hear them and smile. It is wonderful to hear their laughter. Ragna has been so much in Iceland, and with me in San Francisco or Mexico or Peru, and Selma so much in Sweden then Milan, that they have not spent much time together. Now they lie for hours in the hammocks laughing. I do not hear what they are talking about, or care; but their laughter rings like two clear bells, or two more creatures from the forest: whatever it is or means, it sounds good; and I am happy for Ragna, at the same time wondering why we so seldom made each other laugh like that, when each of us loves to laugh and makes others around us laugh.

Mother and daughter.

their laughter as filled with life

as the wild bird-calls

that awaken us at dawn.

knowing neither tongue, i smile.

Our domestic arrangements are a little like a bad soap opera for the entertainment of at least some of the workers here. I have asked Ricardo to arrange a birthday cake for Ragna, but also advised him that she and I have separated. The first day when Ragna and Selma are about to arrive, I go in for lunch, and one of the waiters asks, “Aren’t you waiting for two more people?” It’s easier to delay lunch than dispute the point, and so we eat together. Ragna is not pleased, and when I ask if I should tell the waiters we’ll need separate tables from now on, she says I should. I do. They set me a place at a table alone. But later, as we approach the area for supper, Ragna says, “You can eat with us if you want,” and I ask Ricardo to move the single setting from a distant table to the one where Ragna and Selma are sitting. For the rest of the stay, we sit together at meals. Sometimes we all talk amicably. More often, Ragna and Selma talk amicably with each other in Swedish.

Luci is always asking me whether things are better. At one point she and the other female guide enthusiastically insist that things between me and Ragna seem to be going better. “You’re such romantics,” I tell them. I can tell that they, as well as Ricardo and perhaps others, like both of us and would like to see what they figure would be a happy ending. I can feel them rooting for it, and feel sorry to disappoint them, but Ragna and I know that we are not getting back together.

Most afternoons, just before supper, I’m in the pool. The Canadians are always there too, and often the South Africans. Colorful birds often visit us at pool-side. One bird even discovers the loose toenail on my big toe and kindly pulls it off for me with his beak.

and get more closely acquainted

The Canadians chat with a macaw

After supper I’m often in the bar. The pool table is often in use, sometimes by me. There’s also chess, backgammon, and the like, although I don’t mangage to find a chess game. The bar’s not crowded, and Jean-Paul’s pisco sours are effective. It’s fun.

Night falls early in the jungle.

dusk is not silent.

birds, cicadas, men all rush

to sing before night

descends like death’s sceptre on

the Mother of God River.

By 11 they’ve turned off the generator, and there’s no electricity back in the room. Corto Maltes is quiet; but the jungle is never silent, and at an astonishingly early hour there’s a cacophany of strange sounds, the oddest of which is some bird’s call that I will wish I could have recorded, to add the sound to this blog. It is very loud, and sounds almost mechanical – yet a little like a drop of water landing in a barrel and echoing, if that sound were magnified thousands of times. Each morning I lie awake, listening in awe, long before it’s time to get up.

The security whistles that all through Peru have sounded a little like they might be birds are finally birds, some sounding as if they might be security whistles.

Parakeet Lick

We get up early to walk to parakeet lick. We sit in a blind, waiting quietly. Parakeets do come, at a distance too great for good photography. Then another animal scares them away, and it is all over.

Isla De Monos – Take 2

On the way to Lago Sandoval, we stop again at the Monkey Island. This time we do not see any monkeys at all. We walk in further with the guides, and see a cage where the monkeys sometimes hang out, but we do not see any monkeys. Luci confirms that the monkeys here were at one time domesticated, then freed to live on the island.

Lago Sandoval

We go on up river from Isla de Monos to Lago Sandoval. The lake is a good place to see animals, I’ve read – but one has to get there at dawn. (There’s a place to stay at the lake. If you’re interested particularly in the animals at Lago Sandoval, stay there.)

It’s a fair hike into the jungle to where we will take a couple of canoes. I walk briskly ahead of everyone in hopes of shooting photographs of small animals, or macro shots of butterflies, before everything is stampeded by the general herd, which includes our group and a larger group of French folks. In fact, there ain’t much wildlife to photograph anyway.

One stretch of the path is dominated by processions of leaf-cutting ants. It’s not clear to me where they begin and where they end, but I’m flopped down on my belly a while trying to photograph them.

three guides relaxing

Lake Sandoval

We eat packed lunches at picnic tables near the lake. A couple of the French people and I lose our clothes long enough for a short swim in the lake.

tiger egret

Then we canoe around for awhile. It’s a pleasant day, but most of what we see in the way of wild-life is too far away to enjoy very much. For example, we see a sudden disturbance of water and Luci points out the otters one often sees at Lago Sandoval — but at the distance they could be Olympic swimmers in training.

By the time we’ve hiked back to the river, it’s become a long day. It’s been good exercise.

Canopy

Friday we are going to a canopy, where we can walk above the forest. We walk in from a place which has a sort of zoo of local animals. We lunch among a raft of impossibly slender volunteers. (Decades younger, I’d undoubtedly have been in love with one of them, but now they might as well belong to some other species.) We see various [captive] animals, including monkeys and a jaguar.

Soon after we leave, two birds start following closely behind us, barking at us as if they were dogs. They follow us a long way.

looking up from mid-point

a view from the top

The canopy is impressive. It is said to be 45 meters high, and 90 long. When we arrive, the first step is to climb several stories of a green wooden structure, from the top of which a long suspension bridge extends upward across the valley toward a spot high in the arms of a huge ______ tree.

The bridge is safe enough, but it sways over open air and the tops of much smaller trees, and where lengths of its flooring meet each other they make a cracking sort of sound unnervingly like the sound of something cracking and breaking under sustained weight. Travelers who are convinced that nothing in Peru is built right must feel their complaints turning into nightmares here.

Even I felt a bit disquieted at times walking up the suspension bridge to the treehouse. (Although I’m far from impervious to fears, including physical fears, I have since childhood tended to respond by confronting them, and when younger I did a fair amount of wandering around at great heights under questionable circumstances. Still, the canopy is imposing.) Ragna, who is normally quite frightened of heights, courageously walks on up without hesitation.

Walking up, I get a bit impatient with the woman in front of me. She stops to shoot what seem to me pointless photographs, then I have to stop too, then Ragna gets impatient because she is behind me and wants to keep moving, presumably to get up the thing all the sooner; and I begin to share that urge. I know the bridge is quite secure; but it’s a bit of a rush.

We stay up there awhile, marveling at the view. Like being a kid in a treenhouse. A very high treehouse.

I start back first, hoping the others will stay a while longer. I want to stay on the middle. Having felt a touch nervous on the way up, I want to hang out and eradicate that feeling.

Starting down early allows me to take my time, shoot photographs of the bridge and the sights and the folks still up above, and in the process to feel more and more completely comfortable on the bridge itself. I keep stopping, turning, taking photographs from awkward positions, etc., feeling not the least urgency to move along. (A fantasy pops into my head: wouldn’t it be superb to make love with a woman on this bridge, swaying 45 meters above the earth?! This is my new secret ambition.)

I feel so comfortable that I don’t want to go back down to the ground, but eventually the others start down, and I must.

Ragna’s Birthday

Friday evening is Ragna’s birthday. We are without the South African couple. They are planning to drink ayahuasca tonight. Their guide, or shaman, is named Antonio — and he’s the man who constructed the canopy we walked today.

We eat supper. Afterward, they bring the cake — and, as instructed, also give her a bracelet I had bought as a birthday present in Cusco, before it became so clear that we were parting.

Ragna seems pleased. I try to disown responsibility, suggesting that the Corto Maltes people had seen everyone’s passport information, but of course that doesn’t work. But Ragna is not angry, anyway.

Then some of the guys are in the dining room, telling us there is some sort of fire on the river, and that we should all come out and have a look. We sit on the wooden steps leading to the dock and watch a bunch of colored lights – red, blue, green, and yellow – float gently across the blackness out there, from left to right. Although I jokingly ask whether this too is for Ragna’s birthday, and the guys from the hotel play along, the truth is that they have no idea what the occasion is. Someone in Puerto Maldonado has released these to celebrate the anniversary of something, but they have no idea what.

So we sit above the river, watching the lights. About a dozen of them float by in a group, and as they pass toward our right, still in view, a lone red one appears from the left, a straggler. We imagine him chirping “Hey, wait for me, guys!” In the profusion of sound and color that is a city, we’d never have noticed them. In the darkness of the wide Mother-of-God River and the uninhabited and unelectrified jungle beyond, they are like silent fireworks. But mostly they are just one more small mystery we will never solve.

One night colored lights

secured in bottles float past

on the black river

from unknown celebration

they drift to unknown waters.

Afterward I have a drink in the bar with Selma, shoot one game of pool with Jean-Paul the bartender, and gab for quite awhile with Marco, the new manager, who had been talking with Selma while Jean-Paul and I shot pool. A rambling, interesting, late-night conversation that touches on deaths of parents, birthdays, Noam Chomsky, and my opinion of Peruvian girls. (As to the latter, I tell him I have none, pointing out that I’ve had no chance to experiment.) He’s from Lima, just recently assigned here as manager, and still getting used to being so far from the city.

I sit in the near darkness of my front porch, not quite ready to sleep. It is quiet and fairly cool. The horse is grazing around somewhere. I learn that the watch Ragna gave me has a luminous dial: it is 10:40. After I sit for five minutes or so, thinking of nothing in particular, the small lights that line the paths go out, and whatever lights were on in the main building. I sit awhile in darkness, then retire.

Too soon, the bird whose call sounds like water dropping in a gigantic barrel awakens me, as always, well before dawn.

Antonio

We see our South African friends again at breakfast. They’ve been up all night. Ayahuasca. They are still sitting with Antonio, and he is still talking earnestly. They look fine. David stops by our table, and gives a one- or two-word report on the evening: “All great” or “Marvelous!” Then they are gone, taking an early boat to Puerto Maldonado to catch a plane.

Antonio is still sitting there, so I take my coffee and join him. He is a strong, solid man. He confirms that he built the canopy, and apparently worked studying eagles for awhile. He asks what sort of camera I use and says he used to use a good camera, a Nikon, until it and a 400 mm. lens came undone and fell to the ground as he was starting to climb down from a high eagle-watching platform. He works in conservation and in cultural regeneration, and with healing. In the former capacity, he saw that people from elsewhere “would come in saying what we need, without understanding how things are here,” and so he started a foundation that relies on “people from here.” He speaks slowly, deliberately, but is not a slow man. His dark brown eyes stay on you while he speaks. He is a serious man.

Los Indios

Later that morning we visit with an indigenous tribesman and his family. They are far down river from their native village, making plenty of money talking to folks like us about their lives and culture, showing us how they drink and shoot, and selling us things they’ve made. For an hour or so, the “Chief,” Gregorio, speaks to us in his language, which is translated as necessary. Sometimes we get to participate, as when he’s showing us a native foul-tasting alchoholic beverage we get to drink, or a dance, or how to drink the juice from an unusual fruit we haven’t seen before. He also shoots a couple of arrows for us.

He says he has five wives. He mentions that several times, either because previous visitors have found it remarkable or shocking or because he thinks we should.

He’s a bit of a self-promoter, but a charming one. He’s charismatic, and everyone enjoys the hour we spend with him. His son plays the flute

The Farm

Later that morning we visit a farm. High points include a new fruit, fresh from the tree, and a tree with vines up which Carlos can climb like Tarzan. I’m the only one from our lot dumb enough to try it, and it’s fun for awhile, but I can’t get very far and make the usual fool of myself in the process.

Travel Notes

Lodging

I found the cabins delightful: well-appointed but simple and tasteful. They sit on stilts and are basically wood and screens, with reeds or leaves in the roofs. A sizeable front porch accommodates a small table with a couple of chairs, perfect for an evening glass of wine or for writing or playing cards, as well as two hammocks. There’s electricity — sometimes. We were told we’d have electricity for only an hour or two a day, but in fact it seemed to be on much of the day.

There are also dorm rooms, I believe.

There’s pretty much nothing else around but jungle and river.

Food

The only restaurant is the dining hall, and the menu is what it is at any given meal. The food is reasonably good, although Ragna and Selma noted that every evening it was some form of chicken and rice. (I eat no meat, and the kitchen workers cheerfully produced a variety of non-meat dishes for me each lunch and supper.) It’s a simple, pleasant place to be. Staff are cordial and considerate.

Guides distributed water bottles whenever we went anywhere, and brought along fruit or lunches when we would be away from camp during a meal.

Other Points

The key question is, would Corto Maltes be the right jungle experience for you?

That depends on what you’re looking for; and you should take my comments with a couple of grains of salt. First of all, I’m one who, as you know if you’ve read earlier posts, is accustomed to independence and solitude, which won’t be part of most jungle experiences here and certainly weren’t in Corto Maltes. Secondly, I was there in the drier season, when water and mosquito populations are both down, but the place is probably also not so teeming with visible wildlife as in the rainy season. And of course jungle tours come in all shapes, sizes, and budgets, depending on your age, condition, tastes, and mood.

I’d have rather gone to Manú. Ragna’s preference for comfort and Selma’s schedule made Corto Maltes the best available option under all the circumstances. When Ragna and I broke up, I tried to change my plans, but it wasn’t workable. However, I enjoyed Corto Maltes. I liked the place and the people; and if it’s the type of experience you are looking for, it’s a good (and economical) option. Personally, I’d likely prefer something a little rougher and exciting; but I liked Corto Maltes.

Having said that, I can offer some observations and can pass on comments I heard from others. Some of the others we met there had recently finished trekking the Inka Trail to Macchu Picchu, and were flying home to Canada or South Africa from Puerto Maldonado. They found it precisely the sort of relaxing but somewhat interesting “wind-down” they sought. They enjoyed the flora and fauna we did see, and I saw them at the pool late every afternoon. They got what they wanted, and were basically pleased.

Corto Maltes is a very pleasant experience. Though there are others there, you don’t feel crowded, and it’s small enough to enable you to get to know most staff-members and some of your fellow guests, but sufficiently well-appointed to be quite comfortable.

The activities were a mixed bag. Monkey Island seemed a waste of time, and seemed as if it would be pretty much a waste of time even if more monkeys had shown up more often on cue. No variety, distance, artificiality, former pets.The canopy was a delight, although not what I’d expected. I’d expected a structure on which one would walk some distance at roughly eye-level with the forest canopy, so as to get a look at life at that level. Instead it climbed into the arms of one very splendid tree, with a fine but distant view of the forest below. It would not be for everyone, because not everyone’s gut will permit him or her to climb a swaying (and flimsy-looking, at first) bridge that high above the ground and so apparently flimsy. In fact, it seems to have been well-constructed and maintained, and appears not to be dangerous; but for some, the visceral fear would trump that knowledge. Other than the canopy, the walk itself was somewhat dull; but in a different season it might be quite a bit more interesting.

Luci’s introductory nature walk was more interesting than it sounds. She knows a lot, from having grown up here but obviously also from studying the subject, and presented what she told and showed us in a reasonably interesting way. Luci, as well as the other guides I got to know, could not have been more pleasant, knowledgeable, real, and competent.

Our encounter with the representatives of the T – T (los indios – I forget the actual name of the tribe) was more interesting than it sounds as if it might be, but limited.

The visit to the farm didn’t do much for me, except that I liked trying to play Tarzan on the vines, and the star-fruit tasted delightful fresh from the tree. Again, a different season might have made that a more interesting experience.

The Sandoval Lake outing was worth doing, but: reading and common sense both suggest that if you want really to see animals in a place like that, camp there or stay in a nearby lodge and get up in the early morning, or perhaps get settled in a blind or observation tower before sunset. Mid-day is warm and pleasant for swimming, but nap-time for a lot of animals. Too, two big canoes full of people cruising the same landscape at the same time means that one will scare away most everything worthwhile that it sees close-up.

On balance: Corto Maltes is an extremely tasteful, pleasant, and comfortable place to be. The simple lodgings are enjoyable without being opulent. The guides are knowledgeable and personable, and the kitchen and bar staff are pleasant and helpful. However, I think my own preference would be a slightly more rigorous experience. Alone, I’d have been inclined to arrange for a slightly more adventurous program that involved camping out but carried the promise of more beautiful and unusual sights. I regret that Selma’s schedule didn’t permit us to go to Manú. An acquaintance, a U.S. citizen living in Arequipa, has called it the single most wonderful experience in his several years in Perú. I strongly recommend Corto Maltes, though, in the sense that what it does, it does well.

Meaningfully assessing Corto Maltes is also difficult because I didn’t experience its competitors and alternatives, and because readers will have such varied desires, tastes, and explanations; and at least part of my assessment might be very different if we’d gone during a different season.

I breakfast alone, enjoying the morning light and visiting with the green parrot who hangs around on the front terrace. Then I head for the Wasai to rent a room for the night. While I’m up at that end of town, I rent a motor scooter too. The shift system is wholly unlike what I’m used to from decades of motorcycle-riding, and seems idiotic; and I’m pretty idiotic too: I drive a block, feeling very unsafe and edgy, before I realize that something’s missing. There’s no rear-view mirror, and my uncertainty about what’s going on behind me is far from comfortable. I drive around the block, turn the scooter in, and get one with a mirror. It has two mirrors, but also a right foot-peg and rear-brake mashed too close to each other from some previous accident. Finally I’m off, back to the Don Carlos to pick up my stuff and take it to the Wasai.

My other errand besides changing hotels is to find the SUNARP office. When I bought the car in Lima, I put it in my name and Ragna’s, thinking I might be called back to the U.S. to work on a case and she’d be using or selling the car in my absence. Now I have to have her sign it back over to me alone, so that I won’t run into excessive red tape trying to sell it. Unfortunately I have no luck finding the SUNARP office.

At the Wasi, my new room has a nice view of the river. I lunch on the deck. I chat a bit with some Polish-Canadian folks on an organized tour, then read awhile and feel sleepy. The food takes forever to arrive, but tastes okay once it does. There are birds to watch, and river sounds to listen to.

I return to the room and fall asleep within minutes. A while later I awaken enough to realize I feel extraordinarily hot, but can barely make myself awaken fully, let alone move.

When I finally manage to get out of bed, I go first for an ice cream. I take a table near the window, to shoot more shots of families on motorcycles.

Then I ride the motor scooter down to the docks, determined to cross the river and see where the road goes from Triunfo.

the car safely aboard,

a motorcycle backs onto the ferry

I ride the scooter up a wooden plank onto the vehicle ferry. Of course my foreignness amuses everyone. As we approach the opposite bank, I ask the kid in the black T-shirt how much to pay, and he tells me to ask the older man who’s putting the pole in the ground to tie up to. It seems unlikely that he doesn’t know the answer, and I wonder whether he merely doesn’t know whether his boss wants to jack up the price because I’m a foreigner with a

nearly across

camera. However, after confirming that it’s just the bike and me, no passenger, the man says S./ 2.50. Both his manner and the modest price convince me that’s the normal charge. It certainly seems reasonable.

The wooden plank rests somewhat sideways on a long concrete ramp that runs up the bank at a fairly steep angle. I will need to drive down the wooden plank, then quickly turn right to drive up the steep hill. I cross the plank successfully, but in trying to slow down and turn right I manage to take a small spill. The camera’s fine, though, and the boy in the black T-shirt is there to assist me before I even stand up. I thank him, turn the bike, and head up the hill, guessing the episode probably added a little to everyone’s amusement. Hope so.

I follow the main road. It’s a hard and bumpy dirt road. I pass a few homes and businesses and a grifo, then pasture and jungle and occasional glimpses of the river. It’s a long, dull, dirt road through the jungle, quite wide and quite flat; but for the little motor scooter, it’s treacherous and difficult. It’s hard and bumpy – then soft and gravelly, as if I’m back in New Mexico riding a dirt bike, except that this thing is a beat-up scooter. Keeping vertical takes more concentration than I might have wished. Often I think I’m going down, but manage not to. Sometimes a larger vehicle passes me, and I breathe dirt (which I don’t mind) and drive nearly blind for awhile (which makes staying upright even more of a challenge).

After awhile I spot the river off to my left, and pause to shoot a couple of mediocre pictures. I can also hear a small boat’s engine, and spot the boat progressing on the river from Puerto Maldonado. I walk a few dozen yards along a path toward the river. A pack of small dogs challenges me, barking furiously, obviously defending a small home against intruders while the family is off working or visiting. They aren’t a real danger, though, so I continue far enough to get the photograph I want, then head back to the scooter.

There’s also a spot where they’ve cut down a couple of huge trees and are sawing them up. I don’t know what kind of tree it is; but the smell as I drive past is almost like that of a slaughterhouse. The human figures, who look like ants as they scurry around attending to the huge fallen tree, and the isolation and the heat and the smell combine to leave me grateful I don’t have to spend my day working there.

I go what seems a long way because of the conditions, but isn’t, then return in time to enjoy a jungle sunset and check on where I’m meant to be when in the morning, to leave for Corto Maltes.

The Corto Maltes office is just across the street from my new hotel. They tell me I can take a morning boat or one that leaves about noon-time. Of course I choose the former, figuring I’d like to get out of the town and into the jungle as quickly as possible.

Travel Notes:

Lodging:

Two quite reasonable hotels are the Don Carlos and the Wasai Lodge. The former is at the far [South] end of the main street (Velarde) from the Plaza de Armas. The latter is on Billinghurst, the single street between the Plaza de Armas and the hill overlooking the Madre de Dios River. (Who, I wonder, was Billinghurst? Curiosity about that leads me to a photograph of the new bridge that doesn’t yet exist [see previous post] but which is described as El Nuevo Puente Billinghurst at http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2039979, although the green river in the picture doesn’t look much like the brown Madre de Dios. So I guess Billinghurst was sufficiently prominent to get the bridge named after him. Wikipedia calls it the President Guillermo Billinghurst Bridge. Further research suggests that he was elected to the presidency in August 1912, succeeding Augusto B. Leguia, and served until 1919, when Augusto B. Leguia succeeded him and served until 1930. Wikipedia adds that Guillermo Ernesto Billinghurst was born in 1851 in Arica — and that he served only until 1914. Congress wasn’t ready for his “advanced social legislation” and a military coup deposed him in 1914, when he was sent into exile to die in Iquique. He’s also described as a millionaire businessman, populist, and “reform-minded mayor of Lima” prior to his brief and turbulent presidency. “When Congress opened impeachment hearings against him he threatened to arm the workers and forcibly dissolve Congress.” It’s interesting that he’s remembered so long afterward. But Colonel Oscar Benavides, who headed the successful coup, has a main street in Miraflores named after him, while I had to get all the way to Puerto Maldonado to hear about Billinghurst. )

Probably the Don Carlos is the “better” of the two, but I liked the feel of the Wasai. It’s also closer to the Plaza de Armas, if that matters. The Don Carlos is far from everything, but if there isn’t a moto-taxi lingering outside, the folks at the desk will have one there pretty quickly for you.

Food:

At least for a fellow who doesn’t eat meat, Puerto Maldonado was not a delight — yet I got a couple of good fish suppers, one at each of the hotels. There’s a pizza place on the Plaza, and also a nice restaurant-bar on the north side of the Plaza that seemed appealing and tasteful but had no fish on the menu. I should note that I didn’t try the inviting-looking ceviche place on Velarde that I photographed every time I passed it, and that I heard tales of a couple of good restaurants not near the Plaza. Somehow evenings in Puerto Maldonado I felt too lazy to explore beyond the pizza joint.

in which I arrive in Puerto Maldonado, walk about town, take a wooden ferry boat across the Madre de Dios river and back, and get marooned for awhile on top of a wall.

Unnecessarily, but conveniently, the folks from the travel agency pick us up at the hotel, drive us to the airport, and make sure we get checked in properly. Cusco’s airport is a convenient one – plenty of coffee and other stuff on each side of the security gate, and a bookstore in which I buy the Inca Commentaries, by Garcilaso Inka de Vaca.

Unfortunately, I don’t get through the metal detector unscathed. The guy starts checking me with the metal-detecting wand, and in my right pants-pocket – oops! – is the Swiss army knife that has lain there, unnoticed except when needed, for six months. Gone. Then the lady checking my bulging backpack discovers my second Swiss army knife, stashed conveniently in a small compartment and forgotten, since I haven’t lost or misplaced the one in my pocket. Two Swiss army knives gone in a moment – just when I’m going where they might be useful!

When I board the plane, there’s a family of three in the row where I’m meant to have the window seat. Too bad. But I wait patiently and do get a seat. I start reading Garcilaso.

It’s interesting reading. I recommend it. Garcilaso writes of the Incas from a unique viewpoint: his father was one of the conquistadores with Pizarro, his mother was an Inca princess, and her family taught him much about the old culture that the Spaniards did not know. He grew up in Cusco, very soon after the Conquest. Of course, being a Christian, and having moved to Spain before he was 20, he wrote with some interest in making the Inca appear no more savage than necessary to European eyes. He’s not unbiased. But his account is interesting, knowledgeable, and believed to be generally accurate. (He’s also significant as the first important Latin American writer.)

The Inca mode of conquest seems to have been to march up to the edge of your territory with a force sufficient to destroy you, then parlay. They sent in emissaries to explain why their religion, engineering, customs, and social organization were superior to anyone else’s, and point out that it would be in your interest to join the Inca empire rather than resist it. Obviously this argument was buttressed by the fact that they had brought a force sufficient to kick your ass. Still, they parlayed fairly patiently, and often conquered new territory without the need for violence. When violence did ensue, they were up to it, and ultimately prevailed; but even then they were relatively forgiving. They took your leaders to Cusco to learn to be good Inca administrators, then sent them back as such. (Even if Garcilaso exaggerates a bit, this seems to be basically accurate.)

There was one exception, which I mention not to make anyone uncomfortable but because I think it’s worth knowing, particularly among those who have questions concerning Peru’s reputation for what is now called “homophobia.” The exception: occasionally the Inca conquered a region in which homosexuality was widely practiced — or was believed to be. In this case they killed every homosexual; and the wife and children of any homosexual, if he had any; and all of his livestock; and burned his home and crops.

From the moment we land, and as we ride the noisy moto-taxi in from the airport, Puerto Maldonado is just as I imagined it – no, knew it – to be, from some haphazard collection of dreams, filmic images, and mental visions formed while reading.

What flies past us on the way into town is not beautiful: a lot of motorcycles and moto-taxis, few cars, several grifos, the sloppy greenery of the jungle, simple buildings and houses, most of wood and some on stilts, and occasional food stores surrounded by motorcycles.

It feels different, not merely because of the lower altitude or the humidity. (The air is warmer and heavier.) This is an engaging and unpretentious place. It is quite distant, of course, from Peru’s major cities, let alone the more famous cities elsewhere. More, it feels influenced by the jungle and the climate. None of the buildings is beautiful or elegant or complex, perhaps because one feels here that the jungle will reclaim everything soon enough. No one is dressed elegantly or drives a fine car. The muggy weather, the intermittent rain, and the mud would sabotage finery, and probably rusts cars. It seems a place not at all of indolence, but where the heat and humidity and mud and jungle are too dominant to permit pretentions. The finest clothes would be stained by mud and sweat here, and the finest cars crippled by the roads and rust.

We check in at Don Carlos’s, which overlooks the Rio Tambopata. Its most impressive feature is a green parrot who hangs around on the terrace while you are drinking coffee. It is perhaps the best hotel in town.

Almost immediately I set out to walk to the Plaza de Armas. It is a long walk on a fairly warm Sunday. Domingo. I am alone. Almost all stores are closed. Still, I feel energized, curious about my new surroundings. Too, my mood is odd: the domestic tension and uncertainty make it somber, but fresh solitude in a new place lends it a certain excitement. Traveling alone is always different from traveling in a group or couple: one is freer to follow chance encounters where they lead, and able to munch on and digest one’s impressions before conversation dilutes them.

It’s a pleasant and solitary walk. Even with most businesses closed, the walk to the Plaza de Armas is marked by colorfully painted buildings and lively music. Children are out playing. Moto-taxis ply their trade. Toward the end of the walk, a tall statue of Mary watches over the Plaza.

I find a pleasant ice cream shop, and sit near a window eating chocolate ice cream and taking occasional pictures, mostly of whole families on motorcycles. This is nothing new (decades ago in Taiwan it was like that, and I was guilty of it too, carrying both my girl friend and a tall friend of ours on a little 125 cc. bike), but seems even more extreme here. Soon I also realize that a lot of the motorcyclists I see stopping for friends are actually motorcycle-taxis. The passenger climbs on the back of the bike, sans helmet, and pays a few soles for a ride.

I also spot a place to rent scooters, and resolve to do so the next day.

Around the corner from the scooter-rental shops, a pleasant-looking hotel overlooks the other river, the Madre de Dios. It’s the Hotel Wasi. I arrange to move there the following day, thus complying with Ragna’s desire to have me stay in some other hotel. The Wasi overlooks the other river, the Madre de Dios, not far from where the ferry boats dock. I walk down there, past the sign for the local shaman.

Resisting the lure of the maestro’s sign, I walk a few steps further and see an appealing composition: a shop wall painted bright red as a Coca Cola ad, with a few children, a bicycle, and a dog approaching it. I pause, waiting for them to reach the sign, and notice the shop to my right, with very different advertisement painted on it.

It’s a visually interesting spot, just a few meters from the entrance to the Madre de Dios ferry. I shoot a couple of shots of the kids and the Coke sign, realizing that part of its appeal is its contrasting associations for me: it’s half some Norman Rockwell picture of kids by a barn with a painted coke sign three-quarters of a century ago, and half this frontier river town in the jungle. Another motorcycle family passes them and decides to stop and be part of the picture. It’s such a magical spot that the next motorcycle to pass actually has a family of five on it, trumping anything I shot at the Plaza.

When I reach the long stairway down to the ferry, I learn that it costs half a sole to cross. I walk up the wooden plank from the mud, to general amusement: I’m the only foreigner; in fact, I’m the only foreigner I see on any of the ferry boats I ride or see in Puerto Maldonado, except for one minibus-ful of French-Swiss people traveling with a guide.

Note Rambo’s universal appeal. Decades ago, now, I was walking past Lhasa’s magnificent Potala Almost no one in Tibet spoke any English then, and few even spoke much Chinese. Nevertheless, among the shops and restaurants and chang spots along the street at the base of the Potala, one establishment was proudly labeled “Ranbo Bar.” The misspelling added to the effect.

I’m in the mood to shoot everything I see. The boats tied up to the dock, the boats approaching from across the river, the ferryman, my fellow passengers. I’m like a child, looking at everything with wonder, and my fellow passengers seem to know that – or they’re unaccustomed to an old gringo wandering onto a passenger ferry alone. Is this another place where the tourists are all clumped together in minivans, riding the larger ferry and grouped around a guide? In any case, the men on the ferry boat greet me, grin, remark on the camera. I confess to taking a great many photographs, and as they see how true that is some of them laugh.

Soon after we push off, I spot a huge concrete structure – at least, it looks pretty huge from a small boat on the river – that must be a support for a planned bridge over the river. I ask the boatman, who confirms that it’s for a bridge. The bridge may change his life. It must be for the Trans-_____ Highway that’ll make the drive to here, and the drive from here to Brazil, a whole lot easier. Undoubted progress I hope won’t happen too soon. I imagine the boatman hopes it won’t, either. It’ll probably destroy his livelihood. Intermittently I wonder how it feels to work as you’ve worked for decades, in the shadow of a concrete reminder that you will soon be obsolete.

The future looms over the bow of the ferry

Car Ferry - Rio Madre de Dios

passenger ferries waiting at Triunfo

There is nothing special to see at the ferry-landing on the opposite bank. Just more ferry boats, more steps, a few food vendors and what looks like a bar, and a huge logging truck. And a dirt road heading off toward wherever. Still, I walk about, looking and listening. Then I buy a Sprite from one of the vendors — actually from a young boy spelling his mother at her stand — and sit on a rough wooden bench beside the stand.

waiting

Sitting on a little unpainted wooden bench is good. My legs are old, and it gives them a rest; and it’s a kind of camouflage, allowing me to watch and listen in a lazy way, and shoot the occasional photograph; and closer around me, I have a briefly view into the lives of the vendors. The boy says nothing, but I can feel that, alternately standing and sitting behind me, he’s curious. In the next stall a child with oddly light hair – reminding me of a Mayan girl I photographed one morning in the jungle near Bonampak – stares at me. When I photograph her, her mother watches, amused. When I approach to show the little girl her image, asking “Quien es?” in my sweetest, cajoling tone, she cries. Her mother looks at the image in the camera viewer and invites the girl to look again, but she isn’t having any, and eyes me with distrust as long as I sit there. When I turn around, the boy, whose mother has come back to the stall, is doing puzzles or something from a book. His mother leans over to help him with one, and I realize it’s a schoolbook, which he confirms when I ask. Then I notice that the dictionary is a bilingual one. He’s studying English. So I ask him about that, but he must be just beginning – or his lessons are almost purely from the printed page, and he’s had no experience actually conversing in the language yet — because even “What’s your name?” and “How are you?” draw blank stares from him.

It’s Sunday. Domingo. I sip my soda and enjoy life. When I finish it, now with no good reason to hang round, I descend to a ferry, and after awhile we’re headed back to Puerto Maldonado.

Now the logging truck I photographed up on the bluff is driving onto a larger car ferry, to cross the river toward wherever the logs will become boards. More consumption of rainforest trees, vital to our survival. Above, the truck full of logs was just a big thing to photograph, the biggest thing around up there, dwarfing the little houses and the motorcycles and the food stalls. On the river, it strikes me as one small part of humanity’s rape of the rainforest. Innocuous, unnoticed, quiet, unremarkable. But part of something larger and sad. At the same time, the truck looks almost respendent for a moment in bright sunlight, carried across the river like some huge king.

As with certain witnesses and friends I’ve dealt with, nothing is every quite black or quite white in the rainforest.

almost home

I take a moto-taxi from the ferry area to the hotel. From the hotel I hear music, as if from some festival or perhaps a sporting event. The girl behind the desk explains that it’s a football game, a few blocks away. Having no pressing engagement, I start toward the noise.

Walking the dirt street toward the stadium, the visual surroundings are unfamiliar, but the sound and feel in the air are of a Saturday afternoon high school football game in the beautiful countryside along the Hudson River four decades ago. I am walking down uneven dirt lanes with occasional sheep, and women gossiping in front of houses with slogans written on them, rather than the proud suburban homes of small-town North America; and the kids in short pants playing pick-up soccer against the wall of the stadium are not playing “one-a-cat” with a baseball and a bat against the brick walls of Pierre Van Cortlandt Elementary School. But the energy in the air, the band music, the cheering and jeering of the crowd, are as I heard them striding toward the high school field for that different kind of football.

When I turn onto the street along the stadium walls, though, I am clearly in Peru. The walls are the exceptionally tall walls Peruvians favor. But through holes, perhaps scraped into the wall for just this purpose, youths watch the distant game, as kids watched through knot-holes the major-league baseball games from Shoeless Joe Jackson’s time. And atop the high walls sit groups of men and boys, and a few women. Some have climbed, using the ridges at some levels of the wall and its natural decay. Beneath others stand wooden ladders, just high enough so that from the top rung one can pull oneself up onto the top of the all, as in a comic-strip indication of a burglary.

I walk along, photographing the folks on the walls, and turn right to see more of them, as well as a huge delivery truck parked on the street with three men standing on top of it to watch. There are nearly as many people on top of the wall, or watching through holes or breaks in the walls, as in the stadium.

I’m an outlaw myself. I photograph one family up there, then ask if I may move their ladder slightly to the side of them and use it to join them. Of course I may. The spectacle of a middle-aged foreigner [or shall I simply say “old” ?] climbing the wall with his camera and fisherman’s vest amuses everyone in the area. My legs are not limber, and there are four rebar rods sticking up out of the wall just where I’d like to swing my legs over to let them dangle on the football-field side, but I manage.

The game is not right below us. Several meters within this brick wall is a chain-link fence – also high, and with wire to discourage anyone from climbing over it. Inside the smaller enclosure, a team in red is playing a team in green. Legitimate “stands” are on the side of the field to my left, and in the far corner, to the right of the field, there appears to be another small grandstand. There really do seem to be a lot more people on the fence than inside it, and snack-vendors working the game periodically walk around the perimeter to offer their wares to the spectators on the wall. (Is a seat inside costly? Or do a lot of these folks just feel that an illicit view of the game is a whole lot more pleasurable?)

At some point I ask the girl next to me whether one team is from here and another from elsewhere, or whether these are two teams from Puerto Maldonado. “Los Rojos,” she says, are from Puno. It is a long way. The players from Puno must have flown here.

As I start shooting photographs, something brushes my left shoulder lightly. It is a man who has moved the ladder a few inches from where I left it, and climbed up to sit just the other side of the protruding rebar.

I immerse myself in shooting. The game is too far away Still, it amuses me. It is what I do. Around me the game continues, with kicks and headers and penalties, but no goals; the crowd jeers at one foul, and people toss a few things off the wall onto the grass between us and the soccer field.

At some point I grow a little tired of sitting up there watching. Although I am naturally rooting for the boys in green, I can’t pretend to care very much who wins. (I do not witness a goal and do not ask whether or not any were scored before I arrived.) I haven’t played the game for years and can’t see very well from here anyway.

I glance down for the ladder, which of course is gone. Again I think of a comic-strip burglar dangling from a second- or third-story windowsill by his fingertips, a house-painter having borrowed his ladder. There are now eight or ten more people sitting to my left on this wall, and the ladder is beneath one of them. It’s a good ways from me, there’s no possibility of standing up on this wall and trying to step over people, and it’s not clear that anyone could pass it over to us without climbing down to the ground.

Of course, as soon as I see that I can’t feasibly leave, I desire even more to get away. I am a stupid old man sitting on a wall.

To my right, the young woman also gets curious about the location of the ladder. She can’t see it, doesn’t dare lean back far enough to see how far it’s traveled, and asks her boyfriend or husband or older brother. (He’s holding the child, so I’m guessing they’re parents together.) Someone on the ground manages to recover the ladder and return it to where we are, and I gratefully descend.

I walk back the way I came. There are even more illegal spectators than before, including a fellow who’s pulled his moto-taxi close to the wall to stand on its roof, and others who at first glance look as if they’re hanging by their crossed arms on top of the wall. The pick-up football game has six or eight players now, instead of three.

I have had a full, odd, useless day.

My room is appealing: large, and with a writing desk near the window, and a bit of a view of the river; but quickly I realize that some large population of dogs occupies the yard just below my window. The dogs aren’t happy, and are continuously barking their complaints to the world at large, and as I am unlikely to manage to solve their problems, I ask for another room. Unfortunately, the only inner room available is right next door to the ladies. I have no choice, if I hope to sleep tonight; but it is odd to hear their voices and laughter through the wall.

I eat alone in the dining room, reading Garcilaso. The meal is quite good. The television offers what will be the last major league baseball game ever played at Yankee Stadium. As a child, I hated the Yankees and was thrilled by the Dodgers’ upset win in the 1955 World Series. In my youth, I took delinquent kids to ball-games there, and drove cabs in the shadow of the stadium. Tonight it seems odd to be watching U.S. baseball, but I can’t resist doing so – at least Ragna and Selma come in. Then I retire to my room to write.

Travel Notes:

Hotels:

Hotel Don Carlos (S./ 120)

not bad; adequate rooms with desk and chairs and shelf space for clothes and other stuff; new wing appears to have rooms in some ways less charming but better-appointed than those in the old wing; and they have a view over a set of old houses or huts. Unfortunately, those houses or huts come accompanied by dogs, whose loud barking sent me begging for a new room by mid-evening. Nice folks. Friendly parrot. Quite good food. Modest view of the Rio Tambopata from some rooms and the front terrace.

For better or for worse, somewhat isolated. It’s a good hike to the Plaza de Armas, fun the first time but not something I’d want to have to do when I was in a hurry or carrying a large pack, or in the heat of a sunny day. However, there are usually mototaxis hanging around out front, and if there aren’t any the staff will send a young man to find one.

Restaurants:

I was intrigued by the sign for a Thai restaurant at some hotel out by the airport, but didn’t go check it out.

Hotel Don Carlos serves good suppers.

The Wasai Lodge is another reasonable hotel choice. I moved to it the next morning, to ensure domestic tranquility.

Other Points:

There are few cabs, but plenty of moto-taxis, and some motorcycles that function as cabs. The moto-taxis are fine, except perhaps in a sudden downpour.

Motor scooters can be rented fairly cheaply near the Plaza de Armas. There are four or five shops on one block. Be careful to make sure the one you get has rear-view mirrors and all! The first one I rented didn’t, and I didn’t notice it — and driving a motor scooter with no rear-view mirror and an unfamiliar gearshift system can be unnerving.